If there is a reason why La Fanciulla del West is performed less often than other major works in the Puccini oeuvre, it has nothing to do with the dramatic interest of the work or the quality of the music, and everything to do with the demands of staging. Three tremendous sets, one for each act requiring long intervals for setting-up, and a big chorus, make it a heavy ask: but the result in this Royal Opera production is a profoundly satisfying one. Opera at its international best pushes the ceiling of excellence every night, sending its audiences into the night feeling that they have been present at a great event: one comes to expect it: this La Fanciulla reminds one that it really does happen.
      We live in an age when opera is truly theatre too, in the sense that action and staging are not mere adjuncts to the music, but - as they should be - full partners to it. that too is something we expect, and are uplifted to find proved again and again on the Covent Garden stage. This La Fanciulla is just such good theatre, but it also reminds one that the quality of singing has a role in the psychological dimension of that theatricality along with the quality of the music. Eva-Maria Westbroek's Maria is a classic example of how a profoundly heartfelt rendition of character through the voice serves that interest. In the second and especially third acts her singing was rich in warmth and sentiment, exploring the range of her character's feelings as they were swept tumultuously through love, passionate desire, betrayal, and the final heroic rescue of her beloved, an act which required reaching beyond the angry rough-justice of the lynch mob to touch the individual hearts of tough men.
       In every role from minor to major the performances were sure, satisfying and full of energy and intensity, though Silvano Carroli's Jack Rance towered above them all. His presence and voice were equally commanding; between them he and Eva-Maria Westbroek illustrate how good Puccini is as a composer of music for the drama of feeling.
The moment in La Fanciulla most often reprised in concerts and on compilation discs, Ch'ella mi creda, is beautifully done by Jose Cura. It comes in the high tension of his proposed lynching, the posse assembled in the mine workings under a towering pithead wheel from whose scaffold Ramirez is to be hung, and where Minnie saves him with her hymn to the meaning of individual relations of love and kindness.
      This was a night of opera as opera should by definition be, which is to say a great night of opera. It does the Royal Opera credit that we have come to be used to nothing less.
AC Grayling